After 30 years of planning and 10 years of construction, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) has become fully operational in northern Chile.
The $1.5bn project was inaugurated at an official ceremony attended by 500 people including the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera. This event marked the completion of all major systems of the giant telescope and its formal transition from a construction site to a fully-fledged observatory. ALMA is a partnership between Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. It was originally conceived as three separate projects in Europe, the USA and Japan in the 1980s, but merged to one in the 1990s. Construction started in 2003.
"One of our many natural resources is Chile's spectacular night sky," said Piñera. "I believe that science has been a vital contributor to the development of Chile in recent years. I am very proud of our international collaborations in astronomy, of which ALMA is the latest, and
biggest outcome."
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
Located 5,059 m (16,597 ft) above sea level, in a remote part of the Chilean Andes, ALMA consists of 66 radio telescopes with diameters of 12m and 7m, observing at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths. These have a combined resolution that is 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. ALMA is expected to provide never-before-seen details about the birth of stars, infant galaxies in the early Universe, and planets coalescing around distant suns. It will also discover and measure the distribution of molecules – many essential for life – that form in the space between stars.
An even bigger radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, is planned for 2024. This will have 50 times the resolution of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.
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